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OpenAI Welcomes Sarah Friar (CFO) and Kevin Weil (CPO)

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Re: OpenAI Welcomes Sarah Friar (CFO) and Kevin Weil (CPO)

#81

Post by whimsicalism »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #77
austhrow743 wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If your complaint is that she was a fine CFO but a terrible CEO then i can hardly see her going back to a CFO role as failing upwards.

> If your complaint is that she was a fine CFO but a terrible CEO then i can hardly see her going back to a CFO role as failing upwards Failing upwards would be her announcing she's raised money for a new start-up at which she will be CEO. (EDIT: To be clear, I'm agreeing with you.) Instead, she's going back to where she has a track record. It would be like Musk selling Twitter. Or David Marcus going back to 2001 [1]…

right, you're agreeing with GP

Re: OpenAI Welcomes Sarah Friar (CFO) and Kevin Weil (CPO)

#82

Post by kaast202 »

voiceblue wrote: post #68
zer00eyz wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Rewind the clock a few years. The google engineer who was saying google had AGI. The MS paper saying GPT had hints of AGI. The MS deal "you can have everything up to AGI". The approach was one where a big enough model could be made to feed back in on it self (Q*). If we feed enough data into a big enough model then it will "tip over" and turn into AGI, or sentient or sapient... The problem is that this doesn't work,…

Seems to me like you’d be more likely to sign a deal “up to AGI” if you knew that was a pipe dream that would never happen. It’s easy to sign away your firstborn child if you’ll never have any children to begin with. Edit: Nevermind, looks like it's just a way to hype then!

that does not make sense,the deal is msft gets everything except AGI. They do believe they ll reach AGI whether thats pipe dream or not is a different story because they believe in agi they are fine with giving up everything upto that point

Re: OpenAI Welcomes Sarah Friar (CFO) and Kevin Weil (CPO)

#83

Post by digging »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #49
digging wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A UI can promote positive interactions, and a moderation team can mitigate negative ones. Quite tired of hearing implications that social media platforms aren't shaping the way people communicate on them.

I.e. the app can brainwash people into reflecting some specific sensibilities. That's some Orwellian-level stuff there. The platform shaping communication is a fact, but not a license to use it to program a worldview. The job of a general-purpose platform is to enable communication, but otherwise stay out of the way.

Weak and paranoid take

Re: OpenAI Welcomes Sarah Friar (CFO) and Kevin Weil (CPO)

#84

Post by ttul »

hackerlight wrote: post #69
ttul wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In my opinion, OpenAI is building a platform business [1]. OpenAI is primarily an innovation platform. It provides tools, models, and APIs that enable developers and businesses to create new applications and services, fostering a wide ecosystem of innovation where OpenAI’s technology is the beating heart, driving high-margin revenue. While it also sells API access, its main role aligns with enabling third-party innov…

Why does the existence of ChatGPT reduce the risk of disintermediation?

By creating the best chat interface for its own models - presumably using capabilities that may not be shared with others via APIs - OpenAI ensures that their world class model is harder to replace.

Re: OpenAI Welcomes Sarah Friar (CFO) and Kevin Weil (CPO)

#86

Post by throwanem »

RhodesianHunter wrote: post #66
calf wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've disbanded their superlignment group, and their staff who were able to work on the problem more deeply (STEM people) have since quit, see https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8047 (N.b. in the ex-employee author's pdf article mentioned above, a page dedicates his pdf to Ilya, who is also out of the company, so in context it's a pointed statement writing that dedication IMO)

This appears to project the last few years' growth continuously into the future, whereas a great many experts seem to be suggesting that we've hit a plateau. I tend to believe the plateau theory, given how AI development has occurred over the last several decades with huge leaps forward followed by winters.

It also talks about "straight lines on a graph"...and promptly proceeds to illustrate this concept using a graph with a logarithmic scale.

Combined with the author's evident belief that facilely restating the concept of hard-takeoff singularity (as "AI can replace an machine learning engineer by...") suffices to change the nature of the basic claim he's making, I didn't see any pressing need to read further. Singularitarian sophistry is hardly novel in 2024, and at this late date retains no meaningful capacity even to entertain.

Re: OpenAI Welcomes Sarah Friar (CFO) and Kevin Weil (CPO)

#87

Post by calf »

RhodesianHunter wrote: post #66
calf wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They've disbanded their superlignment group, and their staff who were able to work on the problem more deeply (STEM people) have since quit, see https://scottaaronson.blog/?p=8047 (N.b. in the ex-employee author's pdf article mentioned above, a page dedicates his pdf to Ilya, who is also out of the company, so in context it's a pointed statement writing that dedication IMO)

This appears to project the last few years' growth continuously into the future, whereas a great many experts seem to be suggesting that we've hit a plateau. I tend to believe the plateau theory, given how AI development has occurred over the last several decades with huge leaps forward followed by winters.

Your collection of experts seem to be different than mine, then (so I'm curious who you read instead, please let me know):

Scott Aaronson (the blogger above) is a professor and definitely is more sanguine towards the written article.

Dave Patterson (the Turing award professor of computer architecture) was interviewed last week, he said "We don't know what will happen!" or something like that: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YxVQsLA2ats&t=2045s

One of my own professors (a CS theoretician ) said, at an AI seminar last year, that there seem to be no known barriers left to AGI (paraphrasing).

Actually I'm personally on the fence, so while the pdf article discussed is not rigorous enough, it makes some interesting high-level arguments. One of them is that the recent growth needs to hit some threshold - this argument is not a continuous argument the way you had mentioned.

Re: OpenAI Welcomes Sarah Friar (CFO) and Kevin Weil (CPO)

#89

Post by AlwaysRock »

mupuff1234 wrote: post #5

But if you actually believe they'll be super AI in a year or two, why even bother with a product till then? Seems like the only focus should be getting there first. Unless of course you don't actually believe that.

You think you need 7 trillion dollars to build chips to make that AI? You think you need a product that is appealing so you remain the market leader while you build that AI? You believe you'll build the super AI but your investors want something more than, "its coming" for the next few years? You come from a background of building products and you want to build a product?

Seems like a lot of reasons why you would build a product, even if you think you're build a super AI.

Re: OpenAI Welcomes Sarah Friar (CFO) and Kevin Weil (CPO)

#90

Post by sangnoir »

ttul wrote: post #6
r_thambapillai wrote: post #2

really interesting to see them hire two folks from consumer-tech backgrounds, rather than B2B or developer tools. I wonder if that signals an increasing focus on ChatGPT as a consumer product rather than the API / Enterprise products? (Edit: Sarah actually has a background in both Enterprise and Consumer)

In my opinion, OpenAI is building a platform business [1]. OpenAI is primarily an innovation platform. It provides tools, models, and APIs that enable developers and businesses to create new applications and services, fostering a wide ecosystem of innovation where OpenAI’s technology is the beating heart, driving high-margin revenue. While it also sells API access, its main role aligns with enabling third-party innov…

> In my opinion, OpenAI is building a platform business [1]. OpenAI is primarily an innovation platform. It provides tools, models, and APIs that enable developers and businesses to create new applications and services, fostering a wide ecosystem of innovation where OpenAI’s technology is the beating heart, driving high-margin revenue.

This could have been a description of Facebook circa 2010, for a brief moment, everyone was happy with the arrangement.

Inevitably, the platform will start competing with the developers who "innovate" on top of it in order to gain additional revenue; see 2024 Facebook which is no longer a platform by most measures, or the many apps that got Sherlocked by Apple. The countdown clock has started ticking for OpenAI-wrapper products/startups, starting with the ones with the most revenue and/or utility.

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